'" - >-frílti\ . 'lt _ ' t . 4:'f t n ) -; y . h :.... ((\ . xl 28 dived into it without a word. Then, when I was halfway down the block, his dreamy voice rang after me: "It's still hod" . . Test T HE Riverboat Hotel in Reno, Nevada, might seem an unlikely jumping-off point for a major Soviet- American experiment in nuclear-test- ban verification, but these are clearly unusual times in East- West relations, and so there we were, very early on a recent Friday morning, standing in the cold, clear air outside Reno's newest hotel-casino-its neon-lit paddle wheel flashing cheerily above the sidewalk- and waiting to board one of the mini- buses that were to take us and two dozen other people, participants and observ- ers, to a test site a hundred miles away. "Where's Evgeni?" someone asked a wide-awake young man in a red flannel shirt who was carrying a clipboard. "He's taking the chopper," the man in the red shirt said, referring to Dr. Evgeni V elikhov, the vice-president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a principal adviser to General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev on science and arms-control issues, and a co-sponsor of the experiment. "He and Mischa Gokhberg." He went on checking off names on his clipboard. "I hope every- one's here, because the blast goes off at eleven o'clock whether we're there or not." Once our bus was under way, the young man in the red shirt, who identified himself as Jacob Scherr, the senior staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, or N .R.D.C., and a co-director of the project, gave us a syn- opsis of the events leading up to today's experiment. "About two years ago, N .R.D.C.'s senior staff scientist, Dr. Tom Cochran, proposed to Dr. Veli- khov that we bring together some of our people and some of their people and discuss problems of test-ban verifica- tion," he said. "Cochran and some others went to Moscow in the spring of 1986 and met with Velikhov and his staff, and as a result of those meetings N .R.D.C. scientists were allowed by the Soviets to set up three seismic sta- tions around the Soviet nuclear- weapons site in Kazakhstan." . We asked Mr. Scherr if bringing the Soviet seismic team to Nevada had been difficult. . "Special visas for them were held up by our government for close to two years," he said. "But they finally came through, a month ago, and then we really got cracking. The main thing we're trying to show is that, with the range of seismic technology now avail- able to both nations, it's possible to monitor the kind of low-level explo- sions that our government has tradi- tionally said are unmonitorable and thus, so they say, make a comprehen- sive test-ban treaty unverifiable. For years, it's been possible to monitor Soviet tests in the higher-kiloton range. But there's been a concern all along that the Soviets might detonate nuclear bombs within an underground cavern-a procedure known as de- coupling, which produces the seis- mic effects of a very low-level explo- sion-and that our equipment would be unable to pick it up. We don't agree. " As he talked, our little bus had been making its way across the Nevada landscape, below rolling drab-green hills already parched in the spring sun- shine, past a little town called Nixon, past Winnemucca Dry Lake, past sagebrush and greasewood and many miles of sandy desert. We asked one of the American seismologists, Dr. Holly Eissler, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in La Jolla, California, how the terrain here compared with that of Kazakhstan. "They're both pretty empty and desolate," she said, "and in both you feel a military presence-especial- ly in Kazakhstan. But from a seismologist's point of view they're quite different. Kazakhstan is largely underlain with granite. The earth there is very solid, and sound travels much more efficiently through solids. Nevada is much softer underground, more porous. Seismic signals can't be picked up as clearly." We had turned off the two-lane blacktop and were on a dirt road, heading north into Black Rock Desert. In the distance we could see plumes of sand swirling on the horizon, stirred up by the wind. Overhead soared a solitary hawk, and three helicop- ters were flying low against some red- dish hills. We bumped along the dirt MAY 16, 1988 road for another mile or so and came to a stop where a bunch of cars were parked, also a big truck carry- ing a satellite antenna, and also, now, the helicopters, which landed one by one, blowing more sand and dirt into the air. From the last helicop- ter three men emerged: in the lead, stout and faintly cherubic, wearing a T -shirt that said "Hugs Are the Arms for Peace," was Dr. Velikhov; behind him walked Dr. Mikhail Gokhberg, the deputy director of geophysics at the Soviet Institute of the Physics of the Earth, and N .R.D.C.'s Dr. Cochran. The press (in the form of a TV news team from CNN, one from Sacramento, and a half-dozen re- porters, mostly from Nevada or Cal- ifornia) converged on Dr. V elikhov, who seemed affable and energetic. Jacob Scherr conferred with Dr. Keith Priestley, a bearded seismologist from the University of Nevada, who had helped set up the explosion that was about to take place-at any moment, in a sandy area about a quarter of a mile away, where ten tons of a chemical ex- plosive had been buried a hundred and sixty feet deep. "We're set to go," Mr. Scherr said. "It's all keyed to a satellite time signa1." He started to count down: "Ten. . . · " h " A " " nIne . . . elg t.. . t one, we all peered in the direction of the sandy area. Nothing moved on the surface, but then the ground below us gave a substantial shudder. Then, from the sandy area, geysers of water and gravel began shooting a hundred feet or so into the air. Then nothing, except for a TV newsman yelling, "Oh, wow! Did you get that stuff shooting up?" "That's part of the problem we have with verification issues," Dr. Cochran said. "The important stuff isn't any- thing you can see, like those jets of groundwater-which are totally irrel- evant." Dr. V elikhov was being interviewed by a Nevada reporter who was taking a labor-intensive approach to disarma- ment. "See, Dr. V elikhov, we have several thousand people in the state of Nevada employed in nuclear testing," he said. "What's going to happen to them if we stop?" Dr. V elikhov pondered this a mo- ment and said, "Perhaps they could find jobs in mining. In any case, why would Americans want to work at something so destructive?" As Dr.